Sydney Chinese New Year Branding and Event Design

Sydney Chinese New Year is one of the largest Chinese New Year festivals outside of China.

Every year the City of Sydney invites design agencies and individuals to submit creative of the animal of that year. The chosen creative is then used in advertising to promote the festival, along with the Chinese New Year branding.

Renowned Chinese-Australian artist Hu Ming’s elaborate horse oil painting was selected to be the creative of 2014, the year of the horse.

There was a need to market the festival as a brand. The festival had always been represented with different logo and creative every year in the past. Although the logo worked harmoniously with that year’s creative, Chinese New Year as a festival lacked of a consistent brand presence.

But how should the brand look like? Since every year’s creative is different, the Chinese New Year brand should not only aesthetically carry the ‘Chinese’ quality, but also functionally, be neutral and flexible to pair with each year’s creative.

Typographical approach seems to be perfect for the requirements. The mark ‘CNY14’ (later updated to ‘CNY15′ and ‘CNY16′) adopts the base of Gothem, a humble, geometric typeface; and is characterised with details of a Chinese traditional typeface, Song Ti.

The answer to the neutrality is expressed through the dichotomy between:
– the West and the East;
– contemporary and traditional;
– masculinity and femininity;
– solid and fluid.

Logo variation, brand device, brand guidelines for both internal and external usage were also completed in this task.

Creative

The biggest challenge of this project was to apply Hu Ming’s oil painting to the collateral as large as Chinese New Year’s. First of all, the non-digital and non-vector nature of the artwork made it inflexible to use across media of different specs and scales. Keeping the integrity of the artwork also required great attention to details.

The creative was consistently applied, with the Chinese New Year brand, to a total of 75 pieces of collateral, including JCDecaux Citylights, bus poster, press ads, digital ads and brochure.